The Pricking Of My Thumbs

Gabriel cut his thumb to the bone yesterday, the box knife just cut until it stopped, and then he had to go to the doctor where they pried open the wound and scoured its internal structure without mercy. The verdict?

Whenever he is asked a question, he must speak with great specificity lest people assume he is answering in the affirmative. Occasionally we exhort others to “speak to the hand,” but in this scenario, it’s the reverse. This is a case where the hand’s reply must be firmly rejected.

When he called me about it, I boiled it way down. It’s like when he told me there was a baby on the way, and I asked him why I should be impressed with his contribution, something he was likely to do anyway, and also clouds are actually water, and wasn’t that some crazy shit.

I don’t deal with stress well.

A lot of Super Scribblenauts gets played at my house, and it still works for me, because often you are able to do whatever you want to and still win. But it’s precisely because of this that when it fails to capture some flight of fancy, and this moment is ever lurking, it’s frustrating bordering on maddening. The slightest movement outside its phantom zone, and you feel the cinch of its Golden Leash.

With a developing set of emotional tools, managing this kind of disappointment - thudding vacillations between Godhood and wretched subjugation to natural law - can be challenging for a young person. We decided to play the game in our minds, where there are fewer strictures, and once he had regained a few cubic centimeters of his composure I asked him how I could help him with Scribblenauts.

He asked me if I could write a letter to 5th Cell and tell them the words he thought should be in there. I told him I would, because it was easy, and also because they left some fucking shit out: